Monday, February 14, 2011

ANASTASIA’S NIGHT OUT ON THE TOWN

This week’s challenge is to describe a night out on the town for our protagonist. As I’ve mentioned previously, Anastasia Pollack doesn’t have a spare penny to indulge on herself, thanks to her dead louse of a spouse. If she’s paying her own way, her night out on the town is going to be trolling the aisles of her local ShopRite to find the cheapest brand of mac 'n cheese.

About her only other night out on the town, aside from the night she went back to the office to catch up on some work and discovered a dead body hot glued to her desk chair, is when she volunteers to chaperone the junior high school Valentine’s Day dance. She can get dressed up and listen to music, but she won’t be able to dance for fear of embarrassing her son. So she stays in the background, sipping non-alcoholic red punch, nibbling on heart-shaped cookies, mingling with the other parent chaperones, and tapping her toes to the beat of Green Day’s American Idiot.

No one is going to try to pick her up. Not in the supermarket and certainly not at the school dance. Everyone in town knows she’s newly widowed. Anyone thinking of making a move will wait a respectable period of time.

Besides, how often are there pick-ups in a suburban supermarket, other than the picking up of grocery bags?

As for the dance, Anastasia soon tires of the mindless chit-chat and starts thinking about all the chores waiting for her at home and everything that needs to be completed before her next deadline at work. Her feet are starting to ache from standing in heels on the hard gymnasium floor, and she finds herself glancing at the clock too often.

So much for a night out on the town for my fearless heroine.

ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY GLUE GUN is the first book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries series and received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Read more about Anastasia at Lois Winston's website and blog.

As for middle school dances, now that I can look at them from the other side, I have to wonder why kids were put through such hell by well-meaning (?) adults. Surely all those teacher and parent chaperones could remember their own painful experiences. Unless they were all once the popular kids who actually enjoyed themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

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